Meanwhile, back in academia

One 24 hour plane trip and my white blood cells are all offended. I have come and gone to a fantastic conference (Rethinking Intermediality in the Digital Age), left with my head bursting with ideas and a notebook full of unbelievably smart and astonishing new contacts, and after landing in Brisbane one evening, heading to work the following morning, and then attending fellow DCI cohort presentations the day after that, I am fallen.

Stupid cold. It’s not as bad as the lurgi before, but not for lack of trying.

On the plus side, reading. On the minus side, poor reading comprehension.

In early December I present a progress report of sorts for my research. There’s even a panel evaluation, so, like, no pressure or nothing. Really, I’m not terribly worried about talking. I can talk. Talking is fine. It’s putting this stuff down on paper that feels intimidating. That’s a funny place to be, for me. Usually the writing is like the talking. I got this.

Well, I don’t got this so well right now. It may only be the cold medication that’s keeping me from abject panic, but I don’t feel as mortified now as I have in the past. Maybe the conference toughened me up.

Anyway, I’m writing this post more as a quick note to say I’m not dead or hiding from postly responsibilities. I’m just locked down with other writing (hey — I’ll put up some excerpts) and an inability to focus for more than half an hour due to shocking sinus pressure. This thing took me two hours alone. Honest.

That said, I want to point you all to this entry over on You Suck At Transmedia (I love this title so very much): You Suck At Seeing Transmedia Change. This entry (and the article linked at the start of the entry) touch on some of the things I’ve been seeing coalesce out of the fog banks between my creative work and existing theory: namely, the notion of paradigm. I find myself getting frustrated about people trying to fence out front yards, when what’s really interesting is watching people shift from house to house having arguments and barbecues. But that might just be me and my polyphony obsession. We’ll see.